Fire shuts down Utah coal mine; no injuries

SALT LAKE CITY 
A smoldering fire deep inside a Utah coal mine raised levels of deadly carbon monoxide underground and has brought mining to a halt, but no one was injured, the mine's operator said Tuesday.

St. Louis-based Arch Coal Co. said it planned to extinguish the fire by removing water pumps from a section of the Dugout Mine and letting ground water seepage flood the area. That could take several weeks.

"First and foremost, we want to ensure the safety of the employees," John W. Eaves, Arch's president and chief operating officer, said in a statement late Monday. The company said it had shut down the mine in Utah's Book Cliffs range on Thursday.

Arch used the phrase "heating event" to describe what federal regulators called a fire in a coal seam. The company said a chemical reaction likely caused the coal to start smoldering, but it was producing no open flame. It said the coal could spontaneously combust and produce open flame if the slow burn isn't extinguished.

Arch said the section containing the "hot spot" had been mined out and was being sealed when carbon monoxide detectors signaled a problem last week.

A mine rescue team was unable to extinguish the fire last weekend.

Dugout is Utah's fourth largest coal mine - it produced 3.3 million tons of coal last year, according to the Utah Geological Survey.

Many of Utah's coal mines are unusually deep because the easier coal was mined years ago. Dugout's deepest level approaches 3,000 feet underground, where the "hot spot" was discovered, the company said.

In 2008, Arch said it would bypass $100 million worth of coal at depths of more than 3,000 feet to avoid the kind of cave-in dangers that led to the large-scale collapse of another Utah mine a year earlier. The disaster at the Crandall Canyon killed six miners, and three rescuers dies in another of a series of cave-ins 10 days later.

Crandall Canyon was closed by the owner, a subsidiary of Pepper Pike, Ohio-based Murray Energy Corp., with the bodies of the six miners still entombed inside.

Dugout employs 275 people. None has been furloughed for the temporary shutdown, and they are being reassigned to other duties, Arch spokeswoman Kim Link said.

Arch said Dugout will continue to honor contracts to supply power stations from an outdoor stockpile of coal. The company fuels about 8 percent of the nation's electricity, Eaves said.

Arch is Utah's largest coal producer and the owner of two other Utah mines, Skyline and SUFCO, in the same horseshoe-shaped coal belt of central Utah. Dugout produced 200,000 tons of coal in the first quarter of this year, or about 2 percent of Arch's total production.

Dugout still has plenty of coal - 25 million tons - that can be mined. Arch plans to continue longwall mining there until 2015, followed by a couple of years of retreat mining, said Michael Vanden Berg of the Utah Geological Survey.